This isn’t a joke. Often times rewriting features like this will allow the code to be more streamlined and use the latest KDE library features. This is brining new features using modern and more maintable code that solves long standing issues. Fixing the old code sometimes isn’t worth the effort for a variety of reasons (based on unmaintained libraries, the original code might have been written a while ago so it’s had many revisions of fixes that necessarily complicated the code, etc.)